Ramble With Me.

With a common impulse the multitude rose slowly up and stared into the sky. I followed their eyes, as sure as guns, there was my eclipse beginning! The life went boiling through my veins; I was a new man! The rim of black spread slowly into the sun’s disk, my heart beat higher and higher, and still the assemblage and the priest stared into the sky, motionless. I knew that this gaze would be turned upon me, next. When it was, I was ready. I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun. It was a noble effect. You could see the shudder sweep the mass like a wave.

It’s a great moment in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court when the hero Hank Morgan convinces the medieval rubes that he rules the skies and is causing the eclipse. I went back and reread it recently because, as you may have heard, there’s an eclipse crossing the continental United States today, albeit well away from Connecticut, and it will be the first total eclipse over Nashville, Tennessee in ninety-nine years. That would be ninety-nine complete passes of the Earth around the Sun.

In human terms that’s a small number, but in solar terms it’s piddling, paltry, a trifle—which makes me think trifle would be a good food for an eclipse party, but that’s another story.

There are two things that fascinate me about astronomy. The first is the, in human terms, enormous spans of time. At the end of its life our sun will have probably shone for almost ten billion years. It’s also so far from us that the light we get has taken eight minutes to get here—and since we’re talking about the speed of light which is a universal constant your mileage never varies.

The other thing is that in spite of those enormous spans of time astronomy is so dynamic. At its maximum the eclipse will last about two minutes and forty seconds. And the night sky, if you know when to look, can be full of surprises. I remember when I was a kid and my father woke me up at about 2am to see a total lunar eclipse. Another night we went out in the bitter December cold and watched the Geminid meteor shower. One year when I was in junior high school there was a partial solar eclipse in late spring. My friends and I left school during it and for several minutes everything had a strange bluish pallor. By the time we got home it was over.

Here’s something else to consider: without the Moon the Earth would probably look a lot like our neighbor Mars. The Moon, formed in a matter of days more than four billion years ago when another planet slammed into Earth, has stabilized the Earth and limited the number of punches it’s gotten from wayward meteors, allowing life to not only develop but survive here. There’s something to think about if you’re under the eclipse.

Every summer the Nashville Shakespeare Festival puts on at least one play in Centennial Park. This summer they’re being especially ambitious with two plays: Antony & Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale. Really they’re being extremely ambitious by putting on The Winter’s Tale in Nashville in the summer, although part of the play does take place in the summer, but that’s another—no, wait, it is the story. Never mind.

The funny thing to me is I read both of these plays in a college Shakespeare class under the tutelage of a professor who pointed out that they’re two of The Bard’s least-produced plays. Productions of Romeo & Juliet or Twelfth Night are like episodes of M*A*S*H—always on somewhere, and obviously the NSF, which put on its first play in the park in 1988, has decided there are only so many times they can do The Comedy of Errors (3), Much Ado About Nothing (3), AMidsummer Night’s Dream (3), The Taming Of The Shrew (2), or The Merry Wives of Windsor (2).

And they’ve done The Winter’s Tale before, in 2005, which makes me think the the rerun is a little early since the play itself covers a span of sixteen years.

While the plays themselves are always great I also like to go and look behind the scenes. I didn’t interrupt but I did catch some of the cast at work.

Here’s the stage still under construction. Notice that they’re using one stage for both plays, which is one of the interesting things about Shakespeare. The original productions were in a grassy area behind the Centennial Sportsplex with no sets, only a very few props, and almost no costuming. Well, the actors did wear clothes, and for that we should be grateful—Falstaff couldn’t get the wrinkles out of his birthday suit—but originally the dress code for cast and audience alike was come as you are.

And since all the world’s a stage who could resist a look behind the scenes?

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There were a bunch of pennies on the sidewalk. Why someone left them there is beyond me, and I could have just left them, but instead I picked them all up. Hey, if you see a penny and pick it up all the day you’ll have good luck, right? And even though the day was mostly over and I was headed home I figured maybe it’s a twenty-four hour good luck and maybe it’s cumulative so picking up all those pennies I’d get nine or twelve days of good luck. I couldn’t use the pennies to pay my bus fare, unlike that time several years ago when I poured exact change–all in pennies–into a bus fare collector, but still pennies add up. That’s at least one reason I think the US Treasury keeps producing pennies, unlike our neighbor to the north Canada that abandoned the penny a few years ago. And that’s one of the few things Canada has done that bugs me a little. When I was a kid I was bitten by the numismatic bug, although the doctor gave me a shot and I got better. It was finding Canadian pennies in change that got me interested in coin collecting; it made me feel in touch with the rest of the world. Years later I’d get a job in a mailroom and the foreign stamps that came in turned me into a bit of a Johnny-come-philately, but that’s another story.

Coins even helped teach me some history, like when I first found a 1967 Canadian penny which, unlike the regular maple leaf penny, has a dove. So it doesn’t bother me that my collection of Canadian pennies, large as it is, is still barely worth a loonie–even less than that, now that the pennies are no longer legal tender. It’s a shame the 2017 Canadian coins, which celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, won’t include a penny.

Still I wish Canada good luck on the sesquicentennial. Hey, here’s a penny.

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The future of every sport depends on the kids who play it. The reason soccer has finally gotten major recognition in the U.S., after long obscurity in spite of being the most popular sport in the world, is because the kids who were driven to afternoon and Saturday games by their soccer moms have now grown up. I remember playing soccer as a kid and being asked by my friends, “What’s soccer?” And then when I met people from other countries and told them I played soccer as a kid they’d ask, “What’s soccer?” and I’d have to explain that in the U.S. we have a completely different game that has usurped the moniker “football”. Unlike what Europeans call “the beautiful game” American football players hold the ball. With their hands. But that’s another story.

As a big fan of pool and billiards I’m really excited about the 2017 Atlantic Challenge Cup that’s going on in Klagenfurt, Austria, from July 5th through 8th, that’s sort of a junior version of the Mosconi Cup, with young players representing the United States and Europe facing off against each other. Pool and billiards have been in decline since, well, they’ve had their ups and downs, more downs than ups. The days when someone like someone like self-described “Billiard Bum” Dan McGorty could travel cross-country with no money in his pocket, hustling pool in every small town for just enough money for meals, are long gone. It’s hard to find a pool hall even in a large town now, and even when you do find one it’s likely to only have standard American pocket tables. Forget balkline or other kinds of tables. A woman I used to work with told me her husband, a professional drummer, regularly played snooker.

“Where does he go that’s got a snooker table?” I asked, intrigued because I love the game.

“Oh, he goes to John Prine’s house,” she replied breezily. Only in Nashville.

And I get it. Even a single pool table requires a lot of real estate. Soccer is popular because all it requires is a field and a ball. Or a slightly round object. Or at least something that can be kicked. It’s no accident that most professional pool players are the children of pool players. It’s an expensive hobby, and the shrinking number of pool halls makes it even more expensive, with players having to go as far as, well, Klagenfurt, Austria, for matches.

Sure, I’m rooting for Team U.S. and its members like April Larson, who’s such an exceptionally talented and dedicated player she’s already made the cover of Billiards Digest–and she’s still in high school, where she maintains a 4.0 GPA. But I’m also just glad there’s a new generation keeping what I call the other beautiful game alive.

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The last time I rode a Greyhound bus was in 2000. I recently took one to Cincinnati. It would have been cheaper to fly, but since there are no direct flights from Nashville to Cincinnati the flight would have meant stopovers in Dallas, Honolulu, and Poughkeepsie, and while I didn’t mind that my wife thought it wasn’t such a great idea. I was also looking forward to seeing what had changed.

The first change, of course, was the Greyhound station itself. The old one was dull, gray, and dingy, and filled with an assortment of drifters, grifters, and sifters. The new one, in an entirely different location, is a much brighter shade of gray and seemed to have picked up a higher class of clientele. The old black and white TV sets firmly attached to chairs that cost you a quarter for five minutes of viewing were gone, replaced with plugs for charging whatever devices you happen to be carrying. I couldn’t use any, though, because there was no sitting room. My bus was scheduled to leave at 5:05 am. I got there at 4:15, hoping to beat the crowd, not realizing that the crowd had been there since at least the day before and taken up almost all available space. Maybe recent events in the airline industry have prompted more people to stay grounded.

In the old days there’d be an announcement of departures over a crackly intercom. This time a driver stood at one of the terminal doors and, in a clear voice loud enough to be heard by everyone, announced, “ALL THOSE DEPARTING FOR MEMPHIS, ST. LOUIS, KANSAS CITY, AND ON PLEASE LINE UP HERE!”

Needless to say this was not my bus. My bus, it turned out, was leaving from the terminal next to it, the one where the driver walked in, looked around and mumbled something to the people closest to him before leaving again. I had to ask around a bit to confirm that it really was the bus to Cincinnati because the LED sign on the front of the bus said HAPPY HOLIDAYS.

I’m not making that up. It was part of Greyhound’s War on Some Late May Holiday.

In the old days whenever I’d take a Greyhound bus there were usually a lot of seats available. This time when I stepped onto the bus every seat was taken except one. In the very back. Next to the bathroom. A woman sat in the window seat on the far right. Next to her, in the middle seat, was a man holding a baby with his legs spread so far apart his knee was in the aisle.

The only open seat was to the left of him.

I tried to make myself as small as possible and we both might have been more comfortable if he’d put his knees together. Instead he decided to complain bitterly about the bus being too crowded. And I realized that f-bombs, unlike other forms of munition, lose their strength when you drop one every other word, but that’s another story.

The woman leaned across him and smiled at me. “Excuse me sir, could you move to another seat?”

“I would if there were one.”

It was true and also resulted in the man dropping several more f-bombs, none of which, surprisingly, were directed at me. Then we got a lucky break: a bus company representative came on and offered travel vouchers to anyone who’d take a later bus. I might have taken the offer but my diaphragm was compressed by my fellow passenger’s lower thigh. Several people did, though, and I was able to squeeze out and grab a window seat.

The bus finally got underway a little after six and I settled back with approximately two days of podcasts I’d downloaded in preparation for a long trip.

The bus stopped at Louisville en route to Cincinnati. In the old days I only had to get off the bus at my final destination. Disembarkation is now mandatory at every stop, so I got to look around the Louisville station and get yelled at for taking pictures of the cop and his sniffer dog.

The Louisville station, by the way, has been updated like the Nashville one, and, in addition to a bright gray color and lack of dinginess, also boasts a gift shop and game room.

Then it was back on the bus and I was fortunately able to snag another window seat. The rest of the trip was blissfully uneventful and, possibly because the driver exceeded the speed limit a few times, we arrived in Cincinnati on time.

The Cincinnati Greyhound station has not been updated, and I’m pretty sure they even still had some of those chairs with the TVs. Next time I may opt for the flight with the stopovers, even if it does mean going to Poughkeepsie.

The Acklen Post Office has a wall of fame. Where most post offices used to put up wanted posters—or so I’ve heard, or rather read, since a wanted poster in a post office was once a key plot point in an Encyclopedia Brown story—they put up headshots of notable visitors. As the hub of country music and a major recording center Nashville certainly draws a number of celebrities, and if there’s one thing famous people love to do it’s buy stamps. And if you’re ever waiting in line to buy your own stamps and not in the presence of a live celebrity you can peruse the names and faces of those who’ve come before, people like…

The truth is I don’t recognize most of the people whose headshots grace the walls of the Acklen P.O. A few might be on the D-list but the rest don’t even make the list. Some are has-beens but most are never-weres. If they’ve paid their dues they deserve a refund.

I’m not trying to be too snarky because I believe most, if not all, have done something to deserve their spot on the wall. They may not be known to me but they were, and maybe still are, wanted somewhere, and their only crime is that they fell short but still tried. And it’s not as though I’ve accomplished anything. It’s not as though I’ve earned my spot on the wall.

Maybe I could, though. Just between us it goes through my mind every time I’m in the Acklen post office. What if all I have to do is have a few glossy headshots made?

And I’ll just carry them in and maybe buy a few stamps and hand one over. To make it really easy for them I’ll even bring in my own marker and autograph it for them, and maybe add a personal message: “Stay cool and don’t take any wooden stamps.”

The important thing is I won’t ask because asking, “Am I famous enough for you to hang up one of these?” would give away the gig. If you have to ask if you’re well-known then you don’t have to ask. Also one of the keys to success, or so I’ve heard from people who I assume aren’t locked out, is projecting confidence. As my kindergarten teacher used to tell us, if you dream big, work hard, and believe in yourself there’s a small chance you’ll find happiness and won’t end up sneaking off to the teachers’ lounge at naptime to pour cheap brandy in your coffee. It could be the start of something big. It could prompt me to really accomplish something. At the very least people might start to recognize me. They’ll stop me on the street and say, “Hey, aren’t you…um…do I know you from somewhere?”

And I’ll smile and nod and say, “No, I’m the other one.”

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April 2016-Freethinkers Anonymous planned to celebrate its twenty-first year with the party theme “If This Blog Were A Person It Could Now Drink” with the subtitle “Except In Britain Where The Drinking Age Is Eighteen and Germany Which We’re Pretty Sure Has No Drinking Age And Could Someone Check To See If Wikipedia Has A Section On World Drinking Ages?” When the ordered banner arrived it read “If This Blog Was A Person It Could Now Drink”. An ugly riot broke out in the editorial department and left everyone in a subjunctive mood.

May 2016-Staff were reminded that last year’s annual report was delivered late. A committee to write each annual report a year in advance has been formed but so far has been unable to meet due to scheduling issues.

June 2016-After multiple all-staff meetings and outside consultation a company-wide vote was held. Employees unanimously agreed that founder and CEO Christopher Waldrop should take a shower. Please.

July 2016-The Annual Report has stopped loading due to a long-running script.

August 2016-Judge El: Only three contestants remain and I’m very excited to announce our celebrity judge. His comedies are still controversial for being so explicit and for satirizing major figures. He included numerous specific details about his time and where he lived and yet the messages remain timeless. He lived in Athens from around 446 BC to 386 BC. Please help me welcome…Aristophanes!Aristophanes: κωμῳδοδιδασκαλίαν εἶναι χαλεπώτατον ἔργον ἁπάντων.Kevin (#teamhashtag): This guy comes out in a toga and my first thought is, it’s all Esperanto to me.Judge Nine: Aristophanes, will you please do the honors of announcing the winner?Aristophanes: ἀλλ᾽ ἀνδράρια μοχθηρά, παρακεκομμένα.Kevin (#team#): I am such a Greek geek. This is so exciting to me. I can’t believe we’re being judged by a major playwright of ancient Greece and the master of Old Comedy.Aristophanes: ἡμῶν γὰρ ἄνδρες, κοὐχὶ τὴν πόλιν λέγω.Judge Backspace: Congratulations Team Ampersand! Unfortunately, Kevin, that means you’ve been typed out.Kevin: (#team@) When I got my first computer, a Commodore-64, it really was a £ sign. Go figure.

September 2016- Management announced an end-of-summer plan to find the best local milkshake. A staff project team was formed to list local milkshake places, to consider how to limit the definition of “local”, whether precedence should be given to places that mainly serve ice cream and desserts over burger and fries joints, and one flavor versus several. After the plan was developed, reviewed, submitted, prorated, amortized, finalized, and approved management announced the funds would be used to just buy a new blender.

October 2016-After much consideration staff agreed that vampires, zombies, aliens, ghosts, miscellaneous monsters, and even werewolves have lost their ability to scare and that therefore the theme of this year’s Halloween party would be “Math Teachers”.

November 2016-A subcommittee decided that the preferred office doughnut would be the creme-filled kind. While there were strong opinions in favor of the custard-filled and even jelly-filled ones the deciding factor was that the creme is whipped with air. And that’s gotta mean less calories, right?

December 2016-As a holiday bonus the building was kept open around the clock so staff could fulfill their requirement to work overtime without pay.

January 2017-The company shareholders passed a series of resolutions including “We’ve got reusable bags in the back of the car, let’s remember to take them in the store” and “What exactly are we doing here?”

February 2017-Everyone in the office received a Valentine’s Day card except Kevin.

March 2017-Facing a sudden backlog in work and reviewing an overall decline in productivity during the previous year all staff worked together to produce this year’s annual report titled Seriously, Gang, All We Did This Year Was Get Chris To Take A Shower?

Staff were then sent to cover the World Croquet Cup in Montevideo.

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You might be thinking I just pulled that out of my ass but really it was on March 13th, 1781 that Sir William Herschel first observed an undiscovered planet beyond the orbit of Saturn. Finding Uranus was not easy. Herschel had to get up before the crack of dawn and look deeply into the nooks and crannies of the night sky. At first he thought what he’d spotted was a comet because the idea of another planet all the way up there seemed ridiculous. Other astronomers who probed the sky had seen Uranus and assumed it was a star or comet. It took almost two years of analysis and scrutiny before Herschel himself acknowledged that he’d discovered Uranus. The name for the new planet was also not accepted for almost seventy years because astronomers kept laughing every time someone asked if they’d been looking at Uranus, but it’s been the butt of jokes ever since.

And what better way to celebrate this day of Uranus than with a trip to historic Uranus, Missouri? If you want to know how to get to Uranus all you have to do is take the Herschel Highway. If you don’t get that joke find an astronomer or a thirteen-year old boy to explain it to you after they stop laughing.

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I used to walk to Centennial Park at least two times a week, sometimes more depending on how work was going. My job isn’t stressful but sometimes I still need to get out and clear my head. This seems to be especially true in winter, but when the shock of cold air hits me my head clears up pretty quickly and I don’t need to go far. For some reason I’ve also found myself drawn in the opposite direction most of the time, toward the city’s urban heart instead of away from it, instead of to this small oasis of nature in the middle of the urban sprawl.

I felt that way today too. I felt like I needed to stick to concrete, to wander between buildings and construction and the destruction of old neighborhoods. So naturally I headed in the exact opposite direction.

I took some bread from my lunchwith me too. Back when I went to Centennial Park regularly I’d sometimes feed the ducks, but only in winter, because in the summer the ducks don’t want old bread when they’ve got other stuff to feed on. And even in the winter they can be finicky which is fine because I’ve learned that bread is bad for ducks. The ducks weren’t out either. They were sticking to their island in the middle of the lake.

Still I tossed the remains of my lunch into the water and enjoyed the frenzy that followed. The ducks may not need any handouts but I assume pickings are slim under the surface at this time of year. And then I turned back to work, my head a lot clearer from a moment of nature bread in tooth and claw.

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Dylan Thomas died on November 9th, 1953, almost sixty-three years ago, in New York after a series of reading tours and the premiere of his play for voices Under Milk Wood. In November 1991, twenty-five years ago, give or take a few days, I made a pilgrimage to Laugharne, Wales, the place he called home in the last years of his life and where he wrote his last poems.

Dylan Thomas was a famous poet when he came to the United States to do a series of reading tours. His first trip was an overnight flight where he was too shy to talk to any of his fellow passengers whom he described, according to one source, as a lot of “gnomes, international spies, and Presbyterians”. I was a mere student wedged into a center seat–I always prefer a window seat–between fellow students. Dylan spent several days getting loaded in New York before he went off to other parts. As soon as I arrived in London my fellow students and I were loaded onto a bus and driven off to Grantham which gave us a few hours to get to know each other.

Dylan’s itinerary across America was carefully planned and he read and talked to packed performance halls. When I set out for his home I had no clue where the hell I was going and neither did anyone else. He was mostly driven across America although he also took a few trains. Most of my trip was by train, although I could only get to Laugharne by an old rickety bus–thirty-eight years after Dylan Thomas’s death the little Welsh seaside town he loved was still isolated. None of his biographers, including his wife Caitlin, know why he settled in Laugharne, just that it had always been a stop on his weekend pub crawls. He was a wanderer and I think he just found it by accident and liked the look of the place.

And on my return trip I arrived at Nottingham station so late at night I had to take a taxi from there to Grantham. I was driven by Big Dave who, when he learned where I’d been, told me the Welsh were a lot of gnomes, international spies, and Presbyterians.

The main thing that’s changed in the intervening quarter century is the internet. The Boat House Museum, closed when I arrived at its gate, has its own website. Now I can check train times and bus schedules too. I could plan out the entire trip from this side of the pond. In 1991 it was mainly dumb luck that I found myself accidentally sitting in Dylan’s seat, or in his corner anyway, in the Brown’s Hotel Pub in Laugharne where I drank a pint before I walked a bat-black path up a hill and sat by his grave.

If I made the same trip now there’d be no accidents, no missed connections, no aimless wandering. I’d know in advance what I’d find and that leaves me feeling something has been lost.